A handkerchief for goodbyes,a wedding chemise,in the river, among the fishesfrollicking in the waves. Like a child being bornbeing baptized, these cloth fragmentsdisplay their infinitewhiteness, fascinating.Women of foamand gestures that wash clean,find me a river of beautyto scour away my days.

Why pronounce the names of gods, stars, froth of an invisible ocean, pollen from the most distant gardens? If life aches us, if each day comes tearing us apart, if each night falls convulsed, assassinated. If the grief of an unknown person grieves us, but he is always present, and is the victim and the enemy and love and all that we need in order to be whole. Never say that the darkness is yours, don’t drink joy down with a single swallow. Look about you: there is the other, there is always the other. The air he breathes chokes you, what he eats is your hunger. He dies with the purest half of your death.

For love there is no heaven, love; only this day; this sad strand of hair that falls while you are combing before a mirror. Those long tunnels that we traverse panting and breathless; the eyeless walls, the emptiness that resound with some hidden and senseless voice. For love there is no respite, love. The night does not suddenly become bearable. And when a star breaks its chains and you see it madly zigzag, and disappear, not for this does the law loosen its claws. The encounter is in darkness. The taste of tears mixes with the kiss. And in the embrace you clasp the memory of that orphanhood, of that death.

We kill that which we love. The rest was never alive. No one is as close to us. No other is so hurt by forgetfulness, an absence, a mere nothing. We kill that which we love. An end to the asphyxia of breathing with another’s lungs! The air isn’t sufficient for the two of us, nor the earth for our bodies entwined. The dose of hope is small and sorrow cannot be shared.

Man is made of solitudes, a deer in flight, bleeding, its loins pierced by an arrow.

Ah, but hatred its insomniac fixity of glass: repose and menace combined.

The deer inclines its head to drink, discovers a tiger’s image in the water. The deer drinks the water and its image. It becomes (before it is devoured—astonished accomplice—) equal to its enemy.

Being born, to leave mother like the river that is thrown down, drags strange matters, precipitates its volume to the end, without seeing the sky neither the tree of the margins Nor to polish with love the stone of its heart.

Thus to ours to live we call vertigo, eddy that at times devours, something that entangles What wants to ascend to the surface. And there is not, between the roar and its extinction, more than the turbiedad Of the slime, the dark fish and the pulse without rest.

Thus all the ones that we ended In the sea before to have achieved a name.

Thus all. Not she. Done also of water One stopped thoughtful in deep still pools .

¡What figures leaves us to make out its transparency! Galleries without end, desolate palaces, complex machineries where the universe was transformed In beauty and in order and in shining law. Woman, spin flakes of light; she wove networks In order to catch stars.

Woman, had her masks and played to be deceived and to deceive the others but when she contemplated his true face it was a flower of petals Pale and wilted: love, absence and death. And in his corola there was Some scar almost erased.

For everything that knew it was obedient and sad and when left by that street -that it so well knew- of the good-byes, they went to say good-bye to creatures of beauty, those that it rescued of the chaos, of the shadow, of the contradiction, and made them live In the magic atmosphere created by its breath.

And threw herself into another man's arms; the usurper and stepfather who did not sustain her with the request a servant renders to the majesty of a queen but groveled in their mutual shame of lovers and accomplices.

From the Plaza of Exchange my mother announced: "She is dead."

The scale balanced for an instant, the chocolate bean lay motionless in the bin, the sun remained at mid-point in the sky awaiting the sign which shot like an arrow, became the sharp wail for the mourners.

"The bloom of many petals was deflowered, perfume evaporated, torch flame burned out.

A girl returns to scratch up the earth in the place where the midwife buried her umbilicus.

She returns to the Place of Those Who Once Lived

She recognizes her father, assassinated, ah, by poison, a dagger, a snare before his feet, a noose.

They take each other by the hand and walk, disappearing into the fog."

Thus the wailing and lamentation over an anonymous body: a corpse that was not mine because I was sold to ther merchants, on my way as a slave, a nobody, into exile.

Cast out, expelled from the kingdom, the palace, and the warm belly of the woman who bore me in legimitate marriage bed who hated me because I was her equal in stature and in rank, who saw herself in me and hating her image dashed the mirror against the ground.

I advance toward destiny in chains leaving behind all that I can still hear,the funereal murmurs with which I am buried.

And the voice of my mother in tears -- in tears! She who decrees my death!

With a gesture of earth I spread my arms.With a gesture of the earthWhose lap cradles all creatures.Love raises me,Sustains me, ecstatic as if in a great light,Singing my destiny of rootAnd my obedience.

I do not seek the face of a motherhoodThat overflows all measure.You do not seek a crowd of sons.But look upon my actionsSpringing forth like thick and silent milk.”